Posh is wearing thin

As Mrs Beckham brings out her book on style and claims Audrey Hepburn is her 'icon', SIMON MILLS asks: Why would anybody want to look like this emaciated footballer's wife?

There is one sentence in Victoria Beckham’s book that made me laugh out loud. It’s the bit where she claims that her ultimate style influence is, wait for it, Audrey Hepburn.

Oh come on, love. You really can’t be that deluded can you? Can you? Audrey Hepburn was an impishly delicate cutie who could wear a wheely bin and make it look modish. Her idea of style was simple T-shirts, boat necked tops, little black dresses, mannish ensembles of polo necks, slacks and flat ballet pumps.

Givenchy once designed a whole collection with her in mind. What Audrey Hepburn never did was show off her surgically enhanced cleavage, diet obsessively, attach waist-length copper and blonde hair extensions to her own Barnet or have her skin sprayed orange. As far as I know Hepburn never wore hot pants with thigh boots and a trucker cap. Or a cowboy hat with oversized, mirrored Aviators. So, stylistically speaking, she was the very antithesis of everything Victoria Beckham stands for.

And I am afraid to say that Victoria’s somewhat misguided sense of self sets the tone for what is a fairly preposterous volume. That Extra Half An Inch: hair heels and everything in between - is not an insider’s guide but an outsider’s guide. A fashion fan’s perspective. There are no “fashion secrets” in here. Just the recycled views of someone who has a subscription to Glamour magazine and the transitory outlooks that one can read every week in the pages of Grazia.

Victoria’s USP is advice from someone who has been educated in the fickle vagaries of wardrobe not via a visceral feel for fashion and looks, but rather through an intensive, frequent and protracted, trial-and-error purchasing programme.

She is not, as the common opinion has it, “a style icon” (how that phrase has become deracinated over the years). She is a wealthy shopper. While this extensive shopping has furnished her with a sort of horder’s authority, her talents lie more in the field of exhaustive, unfocussed inventory than informed iscrimination or sartorial wit.

On the pages about jeans, for instance, she just blethers on inconclusively and uninsightfully about all the denims she’s ever bought, covering all cuts and labels, before deciding that dark blue, boot cut, skinny ones are what suits her best. Well, thanks but we already knew that, didn’t we?

Victoria, bless her, is certainly no Alexandra Shulman when it comes to words. These are the overexcited, incoherent ramblings of some one who has far too much money in the bank and too much time on their hands. Reading the dizzy, air-headed wisdom imparted is a lot like eavesdropping on a conversation between a gaggle of bored, cashed-up, shopping-besotted footy wives at an Alderley Edge wine bar.

The inoffensively chatty prose wanders from horrendous cliché (“Looking good isn’t about money. It’s about style. And style never goes out of fashion.” Ooh! get you!) to baffling generality and daffy meaninglessness. “Jumpers can be tricky if you get a well-cut, well-knitted one, you look fabulous. Anything less just looks frumpy.”

"Well knitted”? What the hell does that mean? It sounds less like quality control terminology and more like an Estuary euphemism for advanced inebriation. As in “I went out to the pub last night and got ‘well knitted’. Terrible hang over this morning.”

“Patterns,” she says, sagely, in another sweepingly generalised statement, “can be more challenging and are the equivalent of jumping up and down and shouting ‘Look at my outfit! Hey! Over here!” And as we all know, the last thing Victoria would want is some one actually looking at here outfit would she?

Her mother, clearly cut from the same introspective cloth as her daughter, passed on two vital style tips to her daughter. “Never wear horizontal stripes.” and, ready for this?, “don’t eat beetroot because it stains and I never have to this day.” What insight!

The author has little interest in provenance. She just wants the a sexy look, which is fair enough, I guess, but the occasional scant and perfunctory attempt at reference smacks of canny, educated suggestion and sounds, to me, as if they have been fed to Victoria by her fashion journalist host writer. In the fascinating chapter on “Tops”, for instance, she unconvincingly name-checks Katharine Hamnett’s political T-shirts from the 1980s and claims to acknowledge the enduring influence of the Sex Pistols’ confrontational t-shirt artwork. Hmm.

At one point - and this really made me gag - Victoria writes about “flats with slim cigarette trousers” being “very Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face or Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle.” A Bout de Souffle? Are you referring to the cutting-edge, Goddard-directed, Truffaut-scripted tranche of French ‘new wave’ cinema made back in 1960, by any chance Ms Beckham? The film that pioneered jarring, porno movie-style jump-edits, wantonly inaudible dialogue and highly influential, brutalist black and white style? That A Bou De Souffle?

C’mon Victoria, own up. You’ve never actually seen it, have you? Call me a cultural snob if you will, but I rather fancy that French art house flicks don’t feature much on the Beckham household’s DVD player.

Some of the book is just utter guff. Dear old Victoria is one of those happy, simple-minded, wide-eyed fashion fans who truly believe that designers are gifted with divine inspiration and that history and reference is a bit boring, inconsequential and tiresome.

Thanks to Pheobe Philo, we learn “blouses have come back in recently” and that “C&C California pretty much started off the trend for simple t-shirts.” Er, right.

I think I may be correct in saying that this C&C California company was founded in 2003 but I believe “the trend for simple t-shirts” (not a trend, actually, but a staple) has been going a bit longer than that.

I’d say round about fifty years longer, in fact, when the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando first decided to start wearing what was basically an underwear garment as outerwear, turning the humble t-shirt, previously only worn by lowly manual labourers, into an iconic item of utilitarian chic. Even Gap, the high street mainstay of simple t-shirts has been going since the 1970s.

Then again, that’s just an opinion born out of a bit of basic fashion knowledge and rudimentary research and we wouldn’t want that sort of dull, labour intensive stuff getting in the way of one’s six figure advance fee, now would we?

I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the idea of Victoria Beckham as this pared down, less-is-more style goddess going that “extra inch” for her admirers. I much preferred her as the trashy footballer’s wife with her default-setting glamourflage of hair extensions, Cuprinol skin tone, flared jeans and Gina heels. There was an endearingly tacky honesty about her back then.

As if to galvanise her new minimal, fashion-forward look, the pictures of Victoria Beckham in the book have been styled by someone who has cleverly decluttered her style, calmed down the hair, made her cleavage more modest and softened her startling make up. They still look fake and awkward to me, and have the air of photos that were shot to satisfy the ego of the subject rather than to illustrate a book. Make no mistake, this is vanity publishing in every sense of the word.